Expansive Thought Dynamics Support Emotional Recovery

People spend up to half of their waking life spontaneously wandering alone through a vast landscape of thought, recalling past experiences and recombining them to peer into an uncertain future. These spontaneous thoughts are not merely breaks from our otherwise goal-oriented lives. Instead, they may serve important functions. Here, we focus on the function thoughts may play in people’s emotional lives. We test whether expansive thought dynamics, in which thoughts move broadly across conceptual space, support emotional change. Across two studies, we measured if stable or state-dependent expansive dynamics predict how well an individual will recover from a negative mood. Participants in Study 1 (N = 759) underwent a negative or positive mood induction via memory-recall and then verbalized their spontaneous thoughts for 10 minutes. Participants in Study 2 (N = 233) verbalized their spontaneous thoughts for 5 minutes on 21 consecutive days, with an average of 4 days preceded by a negative mood induction. To quantify the expansiveness of thought streams, we computed four complementary measures that characterize how thoughts relate to one another and unfold over time: structural expansiveness, novelty, divergence in subsequent thought similarity, and momentum away from the recalled memory. Results revealed that more expansive thought dynamics predicted greater improvements in emotion, specifically when people were in negative emotional states. Expansive thought dynamics were associated with more frequent transitions into, and greater persistence within, emotionally neutral states. Together, these findings suggest that expansiveness operates as a homeostatic mechanism, helping people return toward their emotional equilibrium.